TITAS Lore

The Travellers – a once-proud race of advanced superbeings reduced to a mere few wandering eccentrics, a shadowy cabal of intellectuals and geniuses puppeteering all of time and space, just one guy with a magic black box – nobody's really sure on who, what, or how many they are. Possibly this is a side effect of their most famous trait – the ability to Morph between personae and bodies at will and as necessary, to prolong their life and broaden their experience and abilities. The origins of this ability are lost to time – or perhaps fiercely guarded by Traveller authority – but the astounding power allows them to cultivate multiple bodies, each with its own personality, which they can shift between as it suits them. It allows them to recover from even the worst injuries, escape detection and detainment, and blend in on any planet or time. Combined with their time travel technology, an individual Traveller is all but untrackable. Their ability to imitate the physiology of other races, their ability to escape to any point in time, and the many good reasons they have for hiding themselves from the universe make it all but impossible to know how many there are, or ever were.

All bar one – calling himself The Traveller as a bold advertisement of his species, a challenge to the cosmos to look at him, to catch him, to come and get him. Constantly travelling time and space, taking on travelling companions from all manner of worlds and showing them dozens more. A hero, a villain, a trickster, a wise man. His legend is writ in every world's history, and spoken of in every spaceport. On any world where his Monolith rises, adventure is sure to follow.

Black as a the void of space, the Traveller's Monolith is a perfect cuboid – a square prism, to be clearer – that rises vertically from an optimal gravitationally-oriented surface nearest the target co-ordinates in time and space. In layman's terms, it's a big black rectangle that comes up out of the floor somewhere near where you want to be.

One of the many curiosities of the exterior of the Monolith is that it is a solid block of Receptive Obsidian. Though it remains pitch black, those -really- looking will see in the depths of the blackness colours, shifting glints of hues, changing in response to its owner's emotional state, condition, and proximity. Its walls open like doors into the interior of the Traveller's time machine precisely and entirely because they are expected to. The uninitiated may beat upon them for days to no effect, while the lightest push from one who knows where the door leads will swing it open.

Dimensional Potentiality Folding – the very same trick that gives the Travellers their many bodies and effective immortality – is the technology responsible for the interior, a space many times greater than that which could be possibly contained by the exterior block which, I remind you, is solid obsidian. The main chamber itself, the control room, the cockpit, as it were, is easily 30 feet in any direction, with a control console in the centre and doors corresponding to each wall of the Monolith at cardinal directions on the walls.

Expanding the interior of the Monolith is a trivial matter. It is equipped both to craft new rooms from potentiality – though these rooms are generally simple and basic – and to establish fold links to distinct sections of spacetime. The latter being both more expedient and much more fun means that outside the control room, Monoliths are largely a higgledy-piggledy mismatched labyrinth of forgotten and abandoned places.